Quotes of the Day

At first glance, they make an unlikely pair. He's intense and weathered — the kind of guy who shows up to interviews untucked and unshaven. She's easygoing and glamorous (as a young girl, she dreamed of being a princess). But when it comes to making movies, Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui are a perfect match: they act, they produce, and as a screenwriting team, they are French cinema's sharpest critics of the bourgeois élite, people whose relationships they portray as always on the brink of collapse and whose dinner parties combust into uncivil wars.

Bacri and Jaoui have written six films together, but it was 2000's warm comedy Le Goût des Autres (The Taste of Others) — in which a disillusioned businessman falls for an actress and her bohemian lifestyle — that proved their breakout hit, winning four César awards and an Academy Award nomination. Their latest (and Jaoui's second turn behind the camera after The Taste of Others) is Comme une Image (Look at Me), the story of Lolita, an awkward young woman, and her father, Etienne, a self — obsessed celebrity author. As Lolita brings other people into her father's orbit, their efforts to become part of his clique cause marriages to crumble and friendships to implode. Darker and more nuanced than The Taste of Others, Look at Me picked up the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and knocked Steven Spielberg's The Terminal out of the No. 1 spot when it opened in France in September. (It opens across Europe over the next two months.) In other words, Jaoui's girlhood dream has come true: she and Bacri are the reine and roi of ensemble cinema. Not that they see it that way. "I don't read reviews because I don't want to feel bad," says Bacri. "But, of course, I'm very happy when the public enjoys our films and when we're awarded a prize. We all like to be flattered."

Their approach to filmmaking is collective. Even after 15 years together (they're a couple, but not married), Bacri, 53, and Jaoui, 40, are still most comfortable working in big groups. Bacri puts it down to their background in theater — they both started out acting on and writing for the stage — and their shared sense of egalitarianism, both in life and in the movies. "Society is a group and we want to talk about society," he says. "Agnès and I could not write a film with two stars and have other actors serving their stardom. We all have to work together. Nobody should be left out."

Of course, even democratic films need a lead, and in Look at Me, it's Lolita: a fat, plain, insecure 20-year-old with a beautiful singing voice. The search for an actress to play the part was tough. She didn't need to be able to sing (a professional does that), but she had to look the part. "Even in theater courses with a hundred girls in them, there are maybe two who are heavy," says Jaoui. "And then it was very difficult finding a young girl who was comfortable playing somebody so unattractive."

Their search ended with Marilou Berry, 21; as the real-life daughter of another actress-writer-director, Josiane Balasko, Berry knows what it's like to be pushed aside by people trying to get to her famous parent. And Jaoui drew from her own memories as a chubby child of successful parents to add to Lolita's adolescent angst. "The film is quite autobiographical," she says. "When I was small, I wanted to be beautiful. My mother was a shrink and my father was an intellectual who could be very egocentric, but also quite seductive and charismatic."

Lolita spends most of the film either ignored by her father, Etienne (played by Bacri), besotted with her singing teacher, Sylvia (Jaoui) or chasing after a boy who doesn't want her. But Berry keeps her character optimistic and determined, going from lovable to intolerable and back again while she fights to find a place in her father's world. As Etienne, Bacri is brutal, callous and beyond redemption. In The Taste of Others, Bacri's lovelorn character is cranky but harmless; in Look at Me, he's pure bastard. His young wife, Karine, and his put-upon assistant, Vincent, are prime targets for his temper tantrums and cruel sarcasm, but they've got it easy compared to Lolita. Dad invites her to a party and then forgets her outside; he takes her to lunch and spends the whole time on his cell phone; and when he reluctantly agrees to watch her sing in a recital, he walks out in the middle of her solo to write down ideas for his new book.

In the wake of Etienne's raging narcissism, few come out with their dignity intact. Everyone has an excuse for tolerating the author's boorish behavior: Lolita because she's afraid to stand up to him; Sylvia for the sake of her husband, an up-and-coming writer whom Etienne has taken on as his pet project; Vincent because he's paid to. And, because this is a Bacri-Jaoui film, when people are faced with their flaws, they talk — and talk.

"When Agnès and I work together, we each write a few scenes and then we discuss," says Bacri. "And if we disagree, we have a rule about complete intellectual honesty, so we'll debate until one convinces the other. Very much like what ends up in our films." In Look at Me, no thought goes unspoken, no comment undissected. The verbal back-and-forth propels each scene — a single sentence can turn a relationship on its head, transform losers into winners, victims into fighters. Speaking to her friend Sébastien about her father, Lolita goes from pushover to pissed off in an instant. "I don't hate him," she says. "I just want him dead." The dialogue is tack-sharp and finely polished, but still so natural it could have floated out of any café on any street corner of Paris.

Like other films Bacri and Jaoui have written together, Look at Me uses gentle satire to convey moral lessons: inner beauty trumps physical beauty, creative integrity is more important than success. The biggest lesson is on the fragile balance of power. "If you put eight people together, there will always be a vacancy of power," says Bacri. "And someone will always step into that space. There are a lot of tyrants around and they don't have to change because the people around them accept the way they are."

The film focuses on the literary world, but it could take place in any hierarchy. "It could be a metaphor for what happens in movie circles," says Jaoui. "But it would be a failure if people thought we were being critical of a specific group. It's about human nature." In the hands of Bacri and Jaoui, human nature is sometimes amusing, sometimes devastating, but always familiar. They show us how badly we can sometimes treat each other and offer up simple solutions — a compliment, a debate, a hug. Separately, Bacri and Jaoui have successful acting careers. But when they come together to make movies, they become French cinema's dream team.

• JUMANA FAROUKY | PARIS
• With Look at Me, Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui prove they are France’s finest film couple